Last week, her brother Nicanor Boluarte was arrested for selling senior jobs in the government. The president responded by dismantling an elite police anti-corruption unit and unsuccessfully attempting to block the publication of official statistics showing a rise in poverty.
Percy Mayta-Tristán, a medical researcher at Lima’s Scientific University of the South, said that the decree may have been well-intentioned but it revealed a lack of awareness of complex LGBT issues.
“You can’t ignore the context that this is happening in a super-conservative society, where the LGBT community has no rights and where labelling them as mentally ill opens the door to conversion therapy,” he said.
Ms Boluarte was vice president to Pedro Castillo and replaced him in 2022 after the far-Left rural school teacher unconstitutionally attempted to shutter congress.
Since then, she has been propped up by a congress whose members run the ideological spectrum from “Marxist-Leninist” to far-Right but who share a deep social conservatism and have been pushing counter-reforms to protect illegal mining, logging and the cocaine trade.
Mr Castillo’s first prime minister, Guido Bellido, was known, among other things, for praising Fidel Castro for refusing to allow gay people – whom he described using a derogatory term – to participate in the Cuban revolution.